It's been quite a while since we last heard about homebrew emulation of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum on the DS, with the last update being that of SpeccyDS. Now, we get a newcomer into the emulation fray with Nintendo DS homebrew developer's Patrik Rak, and his almost-perfect build of ZXDS. Awesome.

So, what makes ZXDS unique from all of the other ZX Spectrum emulators out there? The fact that it's pretty much stable at such an early stage, being able to accurately emulate Spectrum 128K and Pentagon with sound. And this is with ZXDS's current version being the first beta of 0.7.0.

Here's the complete changelog:

ZXDS 0.7.0 beta 1 (21.12.2007)

* Finally added keyboard graphics, for both 48k and 128k keyboard.
* Replaced the ad-hoc file requester with proper touch screen version.
* Configurable button to key/action binding, with 9 predefined customizable settings.
* Tape browser and manual tape control.
* Autoload feature, with both tape-loader and USR0 mode support.
* Skinning support for changing graphics and color of each UI element.
* Built-in online help.
* Pentagon emulation (no TR-DOS yet, though).
* Z80 snapshots are now compressed.
* Added 1 forgotten T state to EX (SP) instructions.
* Fixed #7FFD paging decoding (A15+A1 instead of A14-15+A1), more demos now work. Changed #1F kempston joystick decoding (loose A5 instead of strict A5-A7), more games should work.
* Disable autoplay when tape end is reached, more flawed tape files should now load.
* Few other subtle fixes (triple buffering race, halt timing upon requester).